1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data object storage, and in particular, to reducing power consumption and improving utilization through time-based storage access.
2. Background Information
Storage power consumption is a growing concern in data centers. Some studies show that over 27% of energy consumed in data centers to be by storage devices. The predicted storage capacity growth of 50% year over year for the next few years, while the increase in storage density of hard disks is expected to slow down, will further exacerbate this problem as enterprises continually add additional storage devices to meet the growing capacity requirements.
Furthermore storage infrastructures are typically provisioned for peak usage leading to under utilization.
Efforts for power management in storage are primarily based on turning off disks and controllers during periods of inactivity or on lowering disk speeds adaptively when workload requirements do not necessitate the disk being at full speed. A good example in the former case is the MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) architecture wherein a disk cache is used in front of a large array of disks to increase the idle inactivity time for the disks so they can be turned off for power savings. The cache serves the read and write requests from the clients, powering the background disks ON only when necessary. The writes are held in the cache and written back in a batched manner when the disk comes on. However, a downside of these approaches is that even if one workload volume on a disk is active then the disk has to be kept ON and thus incur power consumption.